


Straw Millionaire

by Project0506



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character of Color, Culture exchange, Gen, OFC - Freeform, OMC - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 12:47:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4180398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over the course of one summer in Central Florida, Dean starts with 2 hours of work and trades up for a home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Straw Millionaire

“Jamaicans are like Hobbits,” Mz Dorothy said once, and as long as he lives Dean will never forget it.

 

“Do you even know what hobbits are?” he asked, because he has never not been a little shit. He'd already been good at dodging by then and it was no trouble at all to snag the slipper aimed at his head out of the air. The derisive sniff and stinging swat he earned were well worth the dramatic flourish he used to present the footwear back to her.

 

“Jamaicans are like hobbits,” she had continued, as if the preceding scuffle hadn't happened. “Everybody related to everybody, and if there's more than two a we in one place you bet you rass there gonna be food.”

 

That was the year Dean and Sammy stopped subsisting on Spaghetti-Os and Rice-a-roni and 8 pound bags of store-brand knock-off fruit loops. That was the year Mz Dorothy taught him how to grind cassava into flour for bammy, and how to save cassava skins for their poison. That was the year Ms Marta taught Dean the right way to make salsa verde, and how to roast tomatillos so it hides the taste of cyanide.

 

Sammy was still pretty small then: big enough to know when to be quiet but not yet at that point where he was a total shit about doing everything opposite of what dad would have wanted. Easy-going enough to park in a pile with Tomas, Desiree, Charlene and Charmaine in front of afternoon telenovas so they could all make up the plot and script as it progressed.

 

There, while Anna-Kay proclaimed her nine months of seniority over the rest of the pack made her far too grown-up to puppy-pile and the aunties bickered over proper anti-evil wards, Dean learned to cook.

 

(Salt lines, Ms Marta insisted, were a classic because they worked and worked fast. Because a spirit would not sit polite until you sanctified a room.

 

Mz Dorothy made a noise like a laughing bull, because one good breeze and your circle don't break? No, lime-and-holy-water whitewash the window jams and door frames; that's how you do it proper _._

 

Goat blood, they agreed, was messy and smelly and the absolute best way to tell any night-bumper you meant business.)

* * *

 

 

It starts like this:

 

It's a hot day in Kissimmee, with air muggy enough to swim through.

 

“Burgers,” barters Miss Annie, who lives in the room two doors down, who coos over Sammy when they go to the ice machine or laundry and amicably envies his light hair and face. Her own hair is dark as felt and straight as a shotgun barrel, and her face is creased with exhaustion: she's pulled 12 hour shifts all this week, but the park is open for the next 24 hours, it's flu season and if she can impress her boss with her work ethic maybe she has a chance of meeting someone who knows someone who can get her to audition for Jasmine in the next Soundsational Parade. She's already in her uniform, dolled up like a 1950s waitress with a name-tag that says 'Ana-Terésa' in bold letters and 'Honduras' smaller below it.

 

('Annie', she always introduces herself. 'Annie Alvers' because this is a country where you're allowed to be ethnic enough to be exotic, but you don't want to be too ethnic to be promoted.)

 

“All American boys like burgers. Help me out and I'll make you the best burgers you ever seen.”

 

“Only if you show me how,” Dean argues, but he's already reaching to take the snuffling, slumbering baby. Miss Annie smiles with teeth, like she's getting the better deal.

 

(Dean's shoulders and elbows will ache because years of dad's obstacle courses have nothing on kneading potato dough for half an hour. The just-barely-sweet buns are still absolutely worth it, because no way in hell can you put one of Miss Annie's burgers on Wonderbread.)

 

Word gets around the motel about the grim-eyed boy who knows babies from diapers and who won't bitch about work. It's how Dean ends up, three days later, mending seams and minding The Littles while Miss Annie's aunt (of a separation or three) Ms Marta boils Patas de Pollo for soup. She's sure she's not sharp-eyed enough to see the stitches anymore, but that somehow doesn't stop her from seeing immediately when Dean screws up. Dean learns, very quickly, not to screw up. The soup is really fucking good.

 

A day later he meets Ms Marta's friend Mz Dorothy, who hands him a machete and shows him how to hack into coconut husks, to drain the milk for Rice and Peas or Run-Down, and to flake the flesh for Gizzadas and Grater Cakes and Blue Drawers. “Blue Unmentionables,” Mz Dorothy corrects primly. “Little boys don't be talking about nobody's drawers until they have a job and pay they own rent.”

 

It's Ms Marta and Mz Dorothy who dominate Dean's hours after school, with lessons about food and survival and just how often the two are one and the same. But there's always more to learn, and always someone willing to teach in exchange for a pair of hands.

 

From there, it's Mz Dorothy's son Andrew, patiently demonstrating how to turn cornmeal and cinnamon for a sweet porridge while Dean presses army-creases into his work trousers. Then it's Andrew's friend Pretty Shirt, who has an actual name only God and his mam remember, and one's dead and the other ain't talking. It's a picnic in the church yard, and Dean runs Jerk-marinaded hunks of chicken and pork from the red and white Igloo in the Reverend's hatchback to where Pretty Shirt is carefully smoking it in a 50 gallon metal drum, split longways and lined with woodchips.

 

And then it's Pretty Shirt's sometimes-girlfriend Ife, who doesn't really need Dean to do anything for her except maybe listen while she crushes peanuts and plantain for ital. Listen and not laugh, because this is a country where her long, pretty dreads make people think of cannabis and butterfly tramp-stamps and fluff-piece college degrees instead of Jah and Haile Selassie and Zion.

 

It's two weeks later that Ife's roommate Lorie smashes the front end of her El Camino over an 8 foot gator while doing 85 in a residential. It's Dean with a bucket and Scotch Brite removing evidence in exchange for decent fried gator bites, pretty good gator stew, very good gator jerky, and ground gator with beer and cheese stuffed in a pork sausage casing that Lorie cheerfully informs him is good enough to make a saint shank a bitch for seconds. Dean's inclined to believe her.

 

It's Dean meeting Markus, who shows him how to hammer out front-end dents like they were never there, how to touch up and color match by eye in exchange for Dean muddling through 8 attempts to recreate Markus's mother's recipe for potato pancakes based on his spotty recollection of following her around the kitchen. Because Markus can make a diesel sing but can't cook for shit.

* * *

 

 

It ends like this:

 

The Littles are wild, browned from the sun and barefooted in the mud, never less than a pile of them in any one place. Dean's got four of them stuck to his arm like warm, moist leeches when the Impala sails into the motel parking lot, ominous as a hearse.

 

It ends in under two hours, because dad has a _lead_ and doesn't have the time for Dean to return Mrs Ahn's brood, and Dean knows better than to argue. Tran cries harder than Sam, somehow understanding 'goodbye' without knowing any English, and Loc tries to hide in Dean's duffle three times.

 

It ends when Dean begs for half an hour to make the rounds and it's plenty because somehow the Aunties _know_ and are prepared.

 

It ends with Mz Marta's skirts filled with crying Littles, her ever-sharp eyes watching the man with the single-minded fury drag their boys to hell.


End file.
